Communities.cisco.com Reaps Rewards of Sound Strategy

Success in the B2B online community space seems to come from just the opposite of what many companies actually put into it: planning , teamwork and transparency. That’s right. Some companies we talk to or observe online still aren’t grasping the concept that communities need a dedicated team and strategy to thrive.

Communities.cisco.com, on the other hand, gets it. A platform that contains more than 50 communities for Cisco’s partners, customers and employees, communities.cisco.com, also known as Cisco Communities, has almost doubled its membership and has seen a 50% increase in overall traffic in the last year. Additionally, Cisco continues to see measurable savings and efficiencies as a result of the program. Allison Johnson, Social Media and Community Manager at Cisco, who has worked with Cisco for 5 years and communities.cisco.com for the past year and a half, discusses the ingredients that make up Cisco’s recipe for success and the challenges of managing a successful global community platform.

Q: What is your role at communities.cisco.com?

A:  At Cisco I manage the communities.cisco.com platform in addition to driving social media and digital marketing across the company.

When working on the communities platform I oversee the entire program at a macro level. My team and I work on everything from identifying technical problems and scheduling the bug fixes as well as onboarding new teams and setting up the overall program structure. We work closely with the community managers to help them reach their individual goals as well as goals we have for the program.

Sometimes we joke around that in my role I’m essentially a community manager of community managers. Every day is different and I never know what hat or situation I’ll find myself in. A main focus for us is our long-term strategy. People forget that communities are a long-term commitment and it’s essential to align your long-term plan with corporate strategies and initiatives. At the end of the day, the most important thing I can do is give the community managers the tools they need to be successful.

Q: What’s your vision for communities.cisco.com and its business purpose?

A: We set both short-term and long-terms goals for the program. Our 5-year vision is to sustain and create a global community program that deepens relationships with partners, customers and employees. Getting there involves building out some of our core areas to make them more engaging and relevant. We’re in the process of a study to learn more about behaviors. Currently we added a social share functionality to the platform to encourage conversations that are happening in the social web to interact and share with our communities.

Q: Tell us about some of the success you’ve seen as you’ve worked toward that vision.

A: This past year we saw tremendous growth in registrations (more than 50% to more than 110,000). Overall that is one of our largest success metrics. Monthly, we capture metrics and do analysis on our platform. This past year we’ve seen a lot of growth. Ways we hope to continue this growth are building out case studies and best practice sharing modules from these growth spikes.

A more specific example can be seen in our Partner Community. This private space was built for our Cisco partners and we have seen it contribute to reducing travel and increasing the productivity of Cisco experts. These experts travel most of the time and have little time for face-to face interactions with our partners. Now these experts broadcast training sessions for partners on communities, which achieves the goal of deepening relationships with our partners.

The common theme here is that the Web 2.0 technology that communities use can positively impact the business by encouraging innovation, reducing travel costs, opening communication and open up resources. Another way we’re positively impacting the business is that we are capturing and sharing frequently asked questions and conversations within the community. We have a wider reach and we’re able to answer more than one person’s question online. If someone else has the same question it’s all right there with a paper trail.  Communities.cisco.com have proven to be a very transparent, authentic way to communicate so more than one person is able to benefit.

Q: Those are impressive results. What are some recent milestones you’ve reached in terms of overall traffic and membership?

A: Our membership a year ago was at about 74K. We are now at about 113K. In 2011, we saw more than a  50% increase in overall membership and traffic. And, we’re also happy about the response time we’re seeing. Support questions usually get at least one or multiple responses within 24 hours.

Q: What are a few best practices you can outline that have helped achieve these results?

A: Open and frequent communications are a must when you are working with a group this large. We have an open bi-weekly Community Manager meeting to serve as a communication platform as well as a best practice share and overall time to update one another on the various projects we have in the works. We set the agenda in advance and we have an area in our own Community Managers Community, completely dedicated to presentations delivered and communications relayed in these meetings. We encourage CMs to bring up topics they want to cover as well as set the agenda for future facing meetings. Not limiting ourselves, we also bring in our external networks.  I think it’s really valuable that we’re always willing to learn from internal and experts about how to best manage the platform.

Additionally, every community has an established and committed community manager. You must always have one point of contact for each space. This way that person can drive communications about the community and content within their space. It is also imperative that they manage the editorial calendar. This is another best practice.

Overall the CM will coordinate with campaigns in different parts of the organization to drive awareness. Some may also work with hired moderators to make sure questions are escalated to appropriate subject matter experts. They should be focused on the communities health.

Q: What is the biggest challenge ahead of you?

A: I’d say it is taking the platform to next level. As I mentioned before we recently added social share into the platform, but what else is out there? It will be a challenge making communities an easy go-to Web 2.0 tool. There are so many different ways we communicate day-to-day whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, e-mail or text messaging. It’s hard to make sure there’s one central place to go to. From a platform perspective, technology and communities will continue to evolve and it’s my job to monitor this space and help drive what will make communities a better platform and program, without losing sight of our goals.

 - Lauren Bittner, the author of this blog, is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their online community management efforts with their business goals.

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Branded Communities Are Doomed? Not so fast.

By: Miranda Young, September 30, 2011

Engaging your audience isn’t always an easy task and in times like these, when everything has to be monetized, it’s easy to get scared off by the seeming inability to truly measure the value of your online community. To some, online communities really don’t earn their keep or are really only there to preach to the already existing choir of users.  In our experience, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Online communities can be both the lifeblood of an organization as well as a platform to attract those ever elusive new users/consumers. We’ve helped several major organizations grow their online communities into vital repositories of information, communication, and conversation.  Not only that, we’ve seen these communities facilitate huge ROIs for their brand.

Richard Millington, founder of the UK based Fever Bee Community Consultancy, recently wrote an article titled “Why Branded Online Communities Are Doomed.”  Some of what he wrote has merit, but, in our view, a lot of it doesn’t because we’ve personally seen the opposite happen.

Communities CAN be an important source of revenue

“At the moment, most branded community efforts fail. Few attract more than a handful of active participants. Even those that succeed, barely deliver the ROI they promised.” -  Richard Millington

While this may be true of some online communities, blanket statements about their ability to both attract active participants and deliver the ROI they promised is patently false. We helped NetApp build their online community which has gone on to produce over half a billion (yes, billion) dollars in partner owned sales revenue. Cisco has seen a ROI of over 100% from their online community.  And there are other companies all over the country and around the globe that are seeing direct monetary benefits come out of their online communities.  Whether it’s through direct sales coming out of those communities or greater brand awareness, over all, B2B and B2C communities can and do work.

Communities aren’t just for loyal customers

“If you’re trying to reach new audiences, a community is the wrong choice. Why would people join a community for a product/service they don’t buy?” - Richard Millington

Again, this is not what we’ve experienced in our many years of helping companies build out their online communities.  If you’re trying to reach a new audience communities can be one of the BEST places to turn to.  When reading that question, we ask the question back “Why would someone buy a product that they haven’t asked other people, people who are already users, about.”  Communities are where they can get their questions answered and it’s someplace where, once they do become a user, they can return to.  They know the community will be there to help them and having a robust, active community there for your prospective customers is a benefit rather than a waste as Mr. Millington would have you believe.  Not only that, often times these communities help stave off customer support calls by answering questions within the community.  This, in turn, saves the company money and also builds quality relationships among new and loyal users.  Those new users will look to the community as a source of information and turn into loyal users resulting in even more revenue as they continue to buy more products and support your brand through word of mouth advertising.

Size matters but it can’t be one size fits all

“Communities don’t need a big launch, they need a small launch…They need very high levels of personal contact. They need to be directly invited. Most importantly, they need to be prompted for the first few weeks to participate in discussions.” -   Richard Millington

Yes and no. Mr. Millington is right that companies need to focus on nurturing their communities and even help guide the conversations sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that the community as a whole can’t be big at launch.  Directly inviting members isn’t going to get you far when it comes to building your community. We have found that only 3-5% of all invited users or users who find the community feature will go deeper than one page into the new community.  Even then, only 15-20% of those will actually stay long enough to come to their own opinion about what you’re offering and only a few of those will actually post anything. We prefer to advise our clients to look across their entire audience for places where users share interests and create a larger group of members and visitors that can interact with the community from that.  The size of the “starter” community should be based upon a percentage of your entire audience not a finite number of 50-100 as Mr. Millington suggests.

Communities are here to stay

“We need to understand that communities take time, but it’s an investment which pays off many times over.” -  Richard Millington

Now this is something we can all agree on. Communities take time but, like Mr. Millington says, it’s an investment which will pay off in the end.  Done right, online communities can be the keystone of your overall communication plan. We’ve seen them be successful time and time again. Online communities are far from doomed.  We’ve seen quite the opposite.  They can and do have measureable monetary and social effects on both new and loyal users and they are a powerful tool in your arsenal of social media tactics.

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EMC Documentum Developer Community Takes Support to the Next Level

Today Impact Interactions follows Jerry Silver and the EMC Documentum Developer Community on a long, successful journey the site started in 2001 as a place for tools and code to its current state, the full-fledged flourishing community bursting at the seams with member-generated content that it is today. Impact Interactions’ interview with Jerry offers important insights into the best practices that have not only allowed the community to align with Documentum’s business goals but have also nurtured its progression beyond a basic online support space for its members into a valuable destination for them to enhance their reputations and expertise.  Learn from Jerry as he covers everything from how to maintain a steady, well-organized flow of content via the involvement of subject matter experts to tips on recognizing employees and non-employees in a way that results in their ongoing participation.

1) What is your role at EMC and with the community? How long have you been with EMC?

I work in product marketing, covering Documentum xCP, a family of products for Application Composition, Business Process Management and Case Management.  I’ve been here for about 3 ½ years.  Within our marketing group we’re organized by product and also by channel.  In my case, the product is Documentum xCP, and the channel is social media and community for xCP and related products.  Developers are a key constituency for my products, which has led me to the role of manager of the Documentum Developer Community.

2) What is the community’s purpose and when was its inception?

As the name suggests, the Documentum Developer Community is a destination for developers that build on the Documentum platform. We also provide lots of great content covering all technical aspects of the platform, such as administration, integration, and performance tuning.  The community is completely public and complements our support forums, which are currently only accessible to customers with a support contract. That said, we’re putting plans in place to make the support forums public and to integrate them into the community.  So the community’s primary purpose is to meet the needs of our members. It supports them in the use of our products, helps them build their knowledge, recognizes them for their expertise, and allows them to network and share information with other developers.

For the company, the community is a channel for increasing product satisfaction and engaging directly with our customers.  We learn a lot about how they’re using our products and the direction they  need us to take  to meet their business and technical needs.

The community grew organically from a home grown site that was launched in 2001 and primarily provided downloads of developer tools and sample code, to the site that you see today.  It’s part of the larger EMC Community Network (ECN) and runs on a commercial platform (Jive SBS).  Downloads are still important, but we now offer considerable interactive, member-generated content – wikis, blogs, discussions, videos, polls, etc.

3) Tell us about your membership. How has it changed over time? Who are they? Customers? Partners? Employees?

ECN has around 200,000 members, but that’s across all of EMC.  We don’t break the numbers out by community since all communities share a common user base.  I can tell you that our community alone gets more than 20,000 unique visitors every month, and many of those visitors make repeat visits during the month and beyond.  Because the community has evolved over 10 years it’s difficult to say how much it’s grown over that time.  Participation is roughly 20% by employees and 80% non-employees.  A large number of partners participate but we don’t break them out as a separate group.  We are looking at programs to more directly engage partners.

4) Give us some examples that demonstrate how the community has achieved its business  goals.

In terms of meeting member needs, the numbers speak for themselves.  The number of unique visitors is growing, as is the number of first time visitors.  We’re able to maintain that momentum through a steady stream of new content, in addition to  programs like developer contests that offer substantial prizes and generate a lot of interest and useful content in terms of contributed code and expertise. Our last major contest had a $50,000 prize pool.

A key business goal for our division is to encourage an approach to development based on modeling and composition, rather than writing raw code.  This approach is supported by our newest toolset, Documentum xCP, and is a transition for many of our members who are familiar with our legacy APIs and more traditional, code-intensive methods. This has therefore become a focus for the community, and we’ve seen interest shift towards the xCP and composition related information, which is now the most popular content on the site.  It includes a substantial and growing library of “xCelerators” – sample applications, pluggable components, design patterns, and best practice guides that extend our product set in highly useful ways.  So the community has also become an effective distribution channel for product extensions that is much more dynamic and agile than the traditional release cycle.

We’re also starting to track how the community contributes directly to revenue generation.  This is a challenging problem, but we’re figuring out how we can correlate community participation with sales wins and repeat business.

5) What are your greatest challenges and how have you addressed them?

Our community is very content rich, which is great but poses challenges in navigation  – just finding the right content.  One approach that works is to enlist subject matter experts to “curate” content. For example, we have created index pages that guide members to relevant information.  We’re also in the midst of a usability review and expect to revamp the user experience in the near future.  Unlike most marketing Web sites, which are highly architected from the outset, community content grows organically, as new industry topics become relevant and emerge .  While  “too much” content is a nice problem to have, it does mean that a periodic refresh of the community design and navigation is required to keep up with the constant flow of information and interaction communities contain.

Member engagement is another challenge that requires some investment.  For the past couple of years we’ve focused on internally produced content. Getting employees to  participate amidst other competing priorities can be difficult.  It requires persistence and constant evangelism.   What works well is to find employees that are inherently motivated to contribute, and to recognize and reward their participation to create incentives for others to follow.  The reward doesn’t have to be monetary. It seems that just seeing your product or latest blog post featured in the community can be reward enough. We’ve even seen team members compete for who gets the most page views in a month.  We’ve recently had some success with a leader board that tracks the most popular content and the most prolific contributors for a particular segment of the community.  That seems to be working. I’m starting to be approached by more groups that want a presence in the community.

Now that we have an active core of internal contributors we need to encourage more non-employee-generated content, beyond discussions.  For that, we’re looking at introducing reward and recognition programs that will identify community MVPs and provide incentives for increased participation.  I believe that recognizing a member’s expertise and contributions to the community is the best incentive, but sometimes you also have to help things along with the occasional iPad giveaway.

6) What are three best practices that you’ve taken away from this community?

We’ve recently become more consistent about tracking metrics, and I regret that we didn’t do this sooner.  But don’t just track metrics for their own sake.  Make sure you’re measuring meaningful activity, and that the metrics lead to actionable results.  For example, we started tracking the top searches.  These indicate members’ interests, which helps with content planning, but also tells us what they’re having trouble finding in the community.  That prompts us to use curation techniques like index pages to help them discover and browse to content instead of searching for it.  Metrics have also helped us sell the value of the community to senior management, who are more willing to invest in community programs if they can see a measurable impact on revenue or customer satisfaction.

A continuous flow of new content is important, but equally important is the organization of that content.  Many community managers understand the role of moderation, but don’t realize that curation is just as important.  Moderation is mostly about ensuring that community content is appropriate and that responses to questions are given when needed, but curation is about making content easy to find and keeping it up to date. Note too, that these are different roles that require different skill sets.  A non-technical community manager can handle moderation tasks, but subject matter experts who understand the content and the members’ needs are needed to curate.

Finally, recognize that B2B communities differ from B2C social networks, and have a distinct set of challenges and approaches.  In a B2B community, the company is much more welcome as an active participant, and in fact is expected to play an active role.  B2B customers want to engage with their vendors and get to know the personalities behind the products, and that personal connection can be a powerful tool for winning and sustaining customer loyalty.

7) Is there anything we may have missed that would give the world a great example of how your community is benefiting EMC?

Many vendors host a community to answer post-sales support questions and think they’re done.  That’s a necessary starting point, but it isn’t really a community until it becomes an integral part of the members’ professional lives.  I think our community has evolved well past its support roots to become a valuable destination for our members to enhance their reputations and expertise.  And it’s proving to be an effective channel that engages customers at all stages of the “buy cycle” – pre- and post- sales – which brings real value to our business.

Jerry Silver has over 25 years of IT development and marketing experience, specializing in content management, collaboration, application development, Web technologies, BPM, and social media. Jerry spent 15 years at Oracle in a variety of technical roles, most recently as Principal Product Manager of Oracle Application Server Portal. He also served as Director of Product Strategy with content management vendor NCompass Labs, now part of Microsoft, and was Director of Product Management for XMetaL, a leading XML authoring tool. Jerry is currently Senior Product Marketing Manager for the EMC Documentum xCP Platform, and is also responsible for the Documentum and xCP Developer Communities.

Blog: https://community.emc.com/blogs/ecmteam
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JerrySilver
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jerrysilver

- Lauren Bittner is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their social media efforts with their business goals.

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Cisco Service Provider Community Makes Business Personal

We invite you to read and learn from Impact Interactions’ interview with Deborah  Strickland, Manager, Social  Media  and Digital Marketing for Cisco Systems. Deborah manages the Cisco Servicer Provider Community for executives in the mobility industry, as well as many other social media projects. Listen to Deborah discuss the challenges of creating a collaborative online environment for a group and a level of professionals who not only compete, but also typically avoid sharing information. Join us and allow Deborah’s innovative strategies for engaging her target audience and generating fresh, compelling content to pack some punch to your online strategy.

1) Describe your role at Cisco:

I manage a team of other social media strategists and web developers who work across mobility, video, routing and switching, and data center products. We cover events, product and solutions announcements. In January we worked on the Videoscape announcement at CES, the Consumer Electronic Show, and we recently promoted an online TelePresence concert with the singer Jewel. This was in collaboration with AT&T and Marriott.  We also completed our first series of tweet chats for our mobile and video campaigns.

2) Describe the Cisco Service Provider Community and your business goals.

The community started in June 2009 as part of an experiment to increase our global influence. We wanted an open platform where we could discuss the technical and business details of the challenges global operators have in regard to upgrading, managing and identifying revenue opportunities for their networks.  It was not intended to be a forum for product or technical support issues; there are plenty of those already.

A secondary goal is to give our internal subject matter experts (such as solution managers, product engineers, and marketing managers) an opportunity to participate in a public arena where they can showcase their expertise and make themselves available for ongoing conversations. The community is a way to get our experts’ names out there where they can write in a more natural format (as opposed to the highly edited format of a white paper), and put a personal face on our content. Plus it gives them a taste of social media and eases them into the idea of being conversational.

3) Give us an example of this “personal touch” and some of the benefits and challenges of using it.

In one instance, a colleague of mine was meeting mobile operators in Asia to explore the monetization of 3G and 4G networks. I proposed to her that she do something a little different than the usual post-event summary.  Although she wasn’t able to name specific customers, we turned her business trip into a series of travel stories. She did a great job of giving a daily wrap-up recorded from her hotel room. She included local photos and videos of where she happened to be, the food she was eating, and a summary of her customer conversations. This shows that we actually go out and talk to people. We’re not just sitting here in our cubes 3,000 miles away from the action. In this case it was the first time this person did a blog, let alone a video blog and she was a natural. It showed other people on the team how they could use storytelling to get their point across sans the Power Point deck.

People are also more apt to want to reply back to blogs, discussions and other community content if the content is not dry. Our content is written in such a way that you know the person who’s talking. It’s just like you met them at a dinner party.

Some of the content on business sites is really dry. We’re changing how people communicate. The challenge is that the writing on many corporate websites is very reviewed and edited.  People who are used to writing in that style find it hard to relax and be conversational. There can be a sense of fear of participating in social media in a corporate environment. Yes you have your own voice and are telling a story, but you’re also very aware of the approved messaging, competitor commentary, and the fact that you can’t take back what you said. Once it’s out there, it’s there forever.

4) How do you prove the value of your content to your executive team?

One example I use is the comparison of how many views a white paper on Cisco.com will get as compared to how many views that same content gets if we repurpose it in creative ways.  A lot of money is spent on developing white papers, but if they aren’t getting viewed, you’ve wasted time and money. There could be many reasons why a piece of collateral isn’t getting consumed so part of the challenge is to experiment and repurpose that same data into different formats that are easier to digest and share.

I identified one particular white paper that wasn’t getting the views we had hoped, but we knew would be of greater interest.  When we divided the white paper into a series of  blog posts, reworded it slightly , added some photos, and dispersed questions throughout the blog,  we received more than 1,200 views (as opposed to 43 when it was posted on cisco.com)

5) What’s the lesson to be learned here?

You don’t have to start from scratch. There is content in your organization that is valuable, but is not getting used or read. Sometimes content on Cisco.com may be hard to find because the site is so big. If you see content on your corporate site has value, but you are disappointed in its usage you can correct it and repurpose it in many ways. You can’t just post it and forget it, and expect people to come to you and hope they find this great piece you wrote. Bite-size pieces are so much easier and inviting for people to consume. You need to rethink how content is created and distributed. You can always provide a link to the detailed document, but quick summaries of the main points are what most people want to find when they only have a few minutes  to get their questions answered.

6) How does the use of 3^rd party applications like Ulitzer.com, a content aggregator which allows articles on the community to be picked up by search engines and RSS feeds, factor into what you’re trying to achieve?

I believe it’s more important that your content get consumed and that people can find it easily than it is to force the audience to come to us to read it. Why spend time creating content that no one can find? It’s about presenting the information the way your audience likes it. We go where the audience is and reference back to the community. Content aggregator systems are sometimes controversial (are they farming or ‘scraping’ content?); but I see it as experimenting  with where your audience is and their preferences. We also use SlideShare to repost some content which also allows readers to post comments (a feature not supported on cisco.com).  For many reasons, corporate web sites are often restrictive in how content can be viewed and distributed. So why not re-create some of it and post it elsewhere?  I would rather  it get consumed than force users to come to me. The days of controlling where and when users consume your content are dead.

The more places you post your content and the more formats you post your content in, the easier is to find. If we only posted videos on our community it wouldn’t work. We also post a written transcript so it’s easier for search engines to find us. A search engine can’t (yet) look inside a video and tell you the video is about. I’ve also posted the audio portion of a video for those who like to listen instead of read. Options. It’s all about options.

You have to educate yourself on what search engines like. Positioning on the page matters, for instance. There are many guidelines but they are always changing. We’ve gotten better and better at  getting our key topics to achieve higher placement in search results.

7) How do you engage experts to provide content?

There are two ways: By writing content that is somewhat controversial and by asking the right questions.  You don’t need all the answers; but being able to invoke thought and spur discussions (in favor or not), is the goal.

It’s also the way you present the content on the page. You also need to put some personality into it. Remember that only a very small percentage of your community will actually reply with comments. The vast majority people are listeners and observers of information. They’re not likely to take the time to rise up and make themselves known. They have better things to do. Even on sites like Amazon where there are so many comments, the huge majority of the users never post a comment. Don’t expect participation relative to the size of your readership. Keep in mind that not everything of value can be measured. Life isn’t that simple.

8)  What guidelines do you give your experts for contributing?

We give them recommendations for how to get their articles to show up on search engines. We work with them on modifying posts so they are less rigid and more casual. There’s a difference between textbook writing and something that is visually appealing. Most people quickly scan an article first to see if it’s worth it to slow down and read it. Laying  out the article with sufficient white space and easy-to-find inflection points is critical. It’s also important to insert questions throughout the article. No one wants to read through pages of dense copy trying to figure out what the author’s point of view is.  Get to the point!  Our community does not want read a doctoral thesis. They have very little time. They want to see what’s new, get inspired, learn something new, and move on.

– Lauren Bittner, Social Media Consultant, Impact Interactions.

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Upcoming Event – Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators, San Jose CA, May 4-5 2011

Impact Interactions’ president Mike Rowland to present “Ten Years in the B2B Trenches: A Practioner’s Guide to Maximizing the Return on Your Community” at Social Media Best Practices for B2B Communicators Conference, May 4, 2011 in San Jose, CA.

How many online communities really succeed at meeting their objectives? Does yours? Online communities are proven tools for expanding the conversation with your customers, prospects, and fans. Whether you are looking to reduce your support costs, generate leads, nurture customer relationships, or build awareness for your products, online communities require a clear purpose and processes to deliver results. Managed properly, online communities can deliver a stunning ROI that will impress even the most jaded executive. Drawing upon ten years of experience and examples from Cisco, NetApp, SAP, Ace Hardware, Intel, and others, Mike Rowland will discuss many of the best practices and issues that impact online community success (including how to use social media with your community). This three hour session will help attendees to understand the best practices for building, managing, and measuring a focused B2B online community. The last hour of the session will be dedicated to answering your questions utilizing a panel of top B2B community management executives from Impact Interactions’ client teams. To learn more about this great B2B focused event, please click here.

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Impact Interactions Welcomes Experienced Social Media Professionals Lauren Bittner & Adam Crawford!

With our continued growth here at Impact Interactions, we’ve recently added two experienced professionals to help our clients’ social media and online community projects succeed. Please join us in welcoming Lauren Bittner and Adam Crawford to our team!

Lauren Bittner (Social Media Consultant) brings over nine years of professional experience in the social media and loyalty programs to help our clients drive deeper, meaningful relationships with their members. With consulting and management experiences ranging from IBM and McGraw-Hill to Allstate Insurance and Ace Hardware, Lauren has a strong foundation in the B2B social media world. She will initially support the Hall of Fame and Expert member recognition program at Cisco’s CSC as well as support additional projects both for Cisco and our other B2B clients.  Prior to joining us at Impact Interactions, Lauren helped improve usability for client sites as well, bringing another dimension to our services for clients. Lauren got her start in social media at online community pioneer Participate.com.

Adam Crawford (Social Media Consultant, Business Development) is an experienced social media professional with over ten years experience in helping large organizations with their social media and online communities. In his experience, Adam has managed teams of moderators for such diverse companies as NBCi, ATT, AARP, and Ace Hardware. Further extending his social media experience, Adam was an Account Development Manager for Open Text, a leading Enterprise 2.0 content management and social media software company for the past five years. This gives Adam a wide understanding of not only the processes and procedures for social media programs, but also a solid understanding of the technology requirements needed for success. Prior to Open Text, Adam worked for Participate.com as well. In his new role, Adam will help Impact Interactions with Business Development and consulting work.

Please join me in welcoming Lauren and Adam to our team.

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 3)

by Matthew Lees

The first post in this series laid out the question and noted some important similarities between internally facing and externally facing communities. The second post discussed key differences between such communities.

This third piece looks at employee and customer communities from the perspective of the vendors that provide tools, technologies, and services to organizations that sponsor online communities.

The Vendor Perspective
In one of my semi-annual industry reports (“Online Community Platform Company and Product Update – 1H 2008”), I wrote the following:

“2. Blurring of External vs. Internal Communities. Our focus at the Patricia Seybold Group is on enabling those who engage with companies from the “outside,” so we tend to be more interested in systems that support external communities of customers and/or business partners. This is not a clear delineation, though, as Web 2.0—social networking in particular—hits the enterprise. But as advocates of customer-centric approaches to business, we are sanguine on the trend that is moving away from the “us vs. them” mentality (with employees as “us” and everyone else as “them”), and toward a more group- or stakeholder-based approach, with customers and partners simply being another group of stakeholders. It’s happening slowly, but internal systems are being opened up to allow appropriate access to customers and partners. And community platform vendors are leading this trend; half of the companies we cover have products specifically developed for combined internal and external collaboration.”

That was written in August 2008. Many of the vendors I cover still offer products to support both employee and customer communities. Here’s a breakdown of some of the companies:

Technology Solutions for External Communities
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies – Social CRM
•    LiveWorld – Community Center
•    Pluck
•    Powered – Social Marketing Platform
•    RightNow – RightNow Social Experience

Technology Solutions for Internal and External Communities
•    Blogtronix – Blogtronix Enterprise, Blogtronix Community
•    Ingeniux – Cartella
•    Jive Software – Social Business Software (SBS)
•    KickApps
•    Leverage Software
•    Mzinga – OmniSocial
•    Small World Labs
•    Telligent – Telligent Enterprise, Telligent Community

(There are a great many technology vendors that provide tools and services for supporting internal communities only. My fluency with these platforms is more limited, although some well known products are Atlassian Confluence, IBM/Lotus Connections, and Socialtext.)

One Foot in Both Camps
The vendors that provide solutions for internal and external communities have a foot in both camps. That gives them a larger potential customer base, but it also hampers their ability to excel in one area. So, while I am still “sanguine on the trend that is moving away from the ‘us vs. them’ mentality,” I’m not convinced this is the best long-term approach. I see three main reasons as to why:

•    Corporate Bandwidth. None of these vendors is in the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 range. They’re all relatively small companies doing cutting edge stuff, mind you, but they don’t have the deep pockets to be able to do everything they want to…and do them all well.
•    Marketing and Sales Strategies. In a nutshell, they’re selling to different people in different business units. Convincing the CIO and the head of HR to sign with you takes different materials, case studies, and ROI analysis than selling to the CMO, the head of customer service, or the chief of R&D.
•    Development Efforts. Developing software for different use cases is a challenge. These vendors no doubt receive feature requests from customers of their internal and external products; many of these requests likely overlap, but many likely don’t. Desired integrations have similarities and differences, too; integrating with social Web applications (e.g., Twitter and blogs) may be wanted by both camps, but those managing internal communities may ask for integrations with ERP, accounting, and scheduling systems, while those managing external communities may need integrations with CMS and CRM systems. Deciding on the direction of developmental efforts is a tough enough call when you’re serving just one market, let alone two.

To some degree, online communities are online communities. But vendors with one foot in the internal community camp and one foot in the external community camp have more challenging strategic decisions than those focusing in one area. Things are pretty good now for all vendors, as the world of social technology continues to blossom. Within the next year or two, though, I expect to see some changes, such as re-jiggering product lines, acquisitions, and consolidation.

Next
The final post in this series looks at Internal/Employee and External/Customer communities from the perspective of the people charged with managing and ensuring their success.

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Goodbye Call Center, Hello People Power – The giffgaff Experiment

By Matthew Lees

giffgaff is a UK-based mobile telephone service provider that runs off the O2 (Telefónica Europe) network. Basically, what it offers is a pre-paid SIM card that you pop into your (unlocked) mobile phone. (European wireless phone service operates on the GSM standard. In the US, many mobile carriers provide “locked” phones which only accept one type – their type — of SIM card. There’s much more flexibility and compatibility across Europe and, indeed, through the rest of the mobile-phone-using world.)

At giffgaff’s Web site (http://www.giffgaff.com), you can order a giffgaff SIM card and add money to (a.k.a. “top-up”) your existing card.

What you can’t do at the site, though, is contact a customer service representative. Not by phone and not by online chat.

giffgaff does provide a single email address for inquiries; automated acknowledgments promise a response within 24 hours. So somebody is handing email support, which is an asynchronous communications channel. But giffgaff does not have agents who provide synchronous support. (I suppose, though, that if you were to show up at giffgaff’s HQ in Slough, England, there’s a pretty good chance they’d help you out in real time. Based on the tone of the language used on the site, they seem an amiable, if borderline mischievous, bunch.)

No Operators Are Standing By
By not having customer support reps awaiting your calls, giffgaff can keep its prices low and its operation streamlined.

Instead, the company provides support nearly exclusively via Web-based self-service and its customer community. giffgaff’s FAQs, question and answer area, and discussion forums are its primary customer service mechanisms.

Within the community, which is running on Lithium Technologies’ Social CRM platform, giffgaff customers answer each others’ questions. Hence giffgaff’s taglines: “Mobile network with a difference” and “We’re people powered.”

It’s Payback Time
All online communities rely on the contributions of a small but essential numbers of dedicated members who answer a large and disproportionate number of questions. These “active contributors” or “super users” are the lifeblood of their communities and an essential part of their communities’ cultures. They typically participate for the personal and professional connections they make, the inside information they may get, the opportunity to learn, the ability to enhance their reputation and “strut their stuff,” and the sheer fun of it.

giffgaff adds another motivation to this list: making money. The more questions you answer, the more “Payback Points” you receive. Payback points (100 points = £1) can either go toward topping up your giffgaff account or be deposited into your bank account as cash.

In fact, there’s more to Payback points than just answering more and more questions. The better your answers are, the more points you receive, too (this is done via Lithium’s “accepted solution” feature). And you can also earn Payback points by acting as a giffgaff evangelist, getting friends to join and promoting the service (e.g., through social sites and networks such as YouTube and Twitter).

A Sustainable Support Model?
It’s a relatively new business and a relatively new community, having only launched in Q3 2009. And it’s still in beta (although this doesn’t mean what it used to; Gmail was ostensibly in beta for about five years). The site is certainly focused and playful. Is it effective, though? It’s too soon to tell. But here are the questions percolating in my mind:

•  How are giffgaff’s group andsocial dynamics different from those communities that don’t have financial incentives? I’d expect that that the giffgaff community wouldn’t put up with much nonsense, as that would get in the way of earning points. But would this lead to a more or less tolerant community and enjoyable community experience?
•  Can giffgaff provide satisfactory support on a long-term basis without a contact center?
•  If so, can this model work in other industries, or are there aspects of giffgaff’s business (e.g., the telecommunications industry, its particular demographics, etc.) that may make it work for them, but not elsewhere?

A quick Web search shows that “giffgaff” is a Scottish word referring to mutual accommodation or mutual giving. Seems like an appropriate name for an ostensibly people-powered network. Kind of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” thing. If things at giffgaff go according to plan, the UK could see an awful lot of scratching…

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Ricky Gervais (Unintentionally and Eloquently) on Facebook vs. Customer Communities

by Matthew Lees

While driving yesterday to pick up my sister at the airport, I listened to a delightful interview on the radio with Ricky Gervais. He was on the NPR program Fresh Air, talking with David Bianculli — nope, it wasn’t Terry Gross, but veteran TV critic Bianculli is very good, too — about his new animated series on HBO, “The Ricky Gervais Show.”

I’m a fan of Gervais’s, despite the fact that I haven’t watched many episodes of either the US or UK version of “The Office.” (Steve Carell stars in the US version, which is based on the original UK program, created by and starring Gervais.) Through his other shows, his stand-up routines, and his podcasts, you can tell he’s a funny, clever, candid, and amiably self-deprecating guy.

About halfway through the NPR interview, Gervais gives his take on making big-budget shows that aim for mass appeal versus smaller shows that may find only a relatively small, but more interested and passionate audience. He says:

“But, I think I’d rather do stuff that makes a big connection with a few people than a small connection with loads. I’d rather this be a few people’s favorite show, than, you know, millions and millions of people’s 10th favorite show. Because what’s the point otherwise?”

There you have, in a nutshell, the essential difference between a Facebook community and a branded customer community.

Big Connections with a Few vs. Small Connections with “Loads”

You can potentially and relatively easily build up a Facebook fan base that’s much larger than your own branded customer community. With just a single click, people can “Become a Fan” of your organization (or TV show); there couldn’t be a much lower barrier to entry. And marketers tend to love volume.

But the strength of these “Fan” connections isn’t particularly great. Most fans probably never return to the organization’s Facebook page again, and the conversations in the Discussions area tend to be superficial.

In a community that you sponsor and manage, though, you’re building much closer relationships, with stronger connections to your organization and the products and services you offer. (You’re also enabling stronger connections between community members, too.) You members are discussing topics and issues of interest and concern; they’re asking questions and giving answers; and they’re bringing up problems and providing solutions.

Strong and Weak Ties

Network theorists and sociologists call these different types of connections strong ties and weak ties.

(Contrary to how Gervais phrases it, though, there are indeed benefits to weak ties. There is indeed an answer to his rhetorical question “…what’s the point otherwise?”, as good things certainly can come out of being the 10th favorite show of millions and millions of people, especially if you’re an advertiser or an actor, writer, or producer on the show.)

But the main point that Gervais encapsulates is that it’s not always about reaching the most people you can. Big connections (i.e., strong ties) can be more meaningful than small connections, at least to some people and organizations. Marketers (and others in your organization) love deep relationships with people, too.

Your social media strategy should ideally include programs that leverage what both strong- and weak-tie connections have to offer.

Of course, you may not want to base your entire strategy on Gervais’s musings. He’s also the man who said (via David Brent, his Office persona), “If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence that you tried.”

——–

For Further Reading
A lot of interesting and useful information is available on the types and degrees of online social connections. Some is academic in nature and some discusses real-world ramifications and practical aspects of these connections. Here are a few sites with good stuff on ties…
•  Karrie Karahalios: Strong and Weak Ties in Social Media, by David Weinberger (March 3, 2010)
•  40 Years On: The History & Evolution of Social Media, by Jenny Ambrozek (November 4, 2009)
•  Weak Ties Build Strong Networks, by Adrian Scholes (May 21, 2009)
•  Design Your Own Custom Ties on Zazzle

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There’s No Place Like (the) Home (Page)

by Matthew Lees

They say, in politics, you can tell an administration’s priorities by its budget. Office holders can talk all they want about the importance of education, services to seniors, and having the latest and greatest fire-fighting equipment, but are they putting their money where their mouths are? It’s the how they allocate the dollars that tells you what they’re serious about.

Similarly, you can tell a company’s priorities by what’s on its home page.

Sure, home page real estate is precious, and what does or doesn’t appear there (and where it appears) can be a contentious issue. I don’t know of any fist fights that have broken out over what links appear on the home page (and where they appear), but I’ve been around some pretty heated discussions.

The debates are understandable, as your home page can be the gateway to your organization (and your products and services) as well as the first impression it makes. It also cuts across organizational lines, as just about all departments are impacted to one degree or another and should, therefore, have at least some say in the matter. Many voices makes for difficult decision making.

Of course, it’s not all about the home page. There are many ways besides your home page that customers, prospective customers, business partners, and others can discover the content within your site, including community content. In many ways, Google is your home-away-from-home page, as that’s often the entryway to your site’s content. So what’s on your internal pages, and your overall SEO efforts, will also have a sizable impact on how people get to your content.

But there’s no getting around the visibility, cachet, and effectiveness of being on the home page.

So the question comes down to: Is there a link to your customer or partner community on your home page?

If your customers (or partners or readers or users, etc.) are important enough to your organization, there will be. Linking to your community on your home page not only makes it easier for people to find your community, it also makes it easier for people to find each other. And, perhaps more importantly, it makes the symbolic statement that you highly value your customers and their perspectives – the good, the bad, and the ugly – by supporting their candid discussions, collaboration, and networking, and by being part of the conversation yourself.

(I’m not talking about displaying links to your Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pages. That’s all well and good, but that’s done more for marketing purposes than customer engagement.)

Here’s a selection of a dozen organizations that feature their communities via prominent links on their home pages. (There are certainly many others. If I handed out Customer Community Seals of Approval, all these sites would get them for their home page placement alone.)

•   AARP

•  Adobe

•  American Diabetes Association

•  Caterpillar

•  EMC

•  LeapFrog Enterprises

•  The MathWorks

•  NetApp

•  RIDGID

•  Sage Software (ACT!)

•  Unilever (Slim-Fast)

•  VMware

Many other organizations link to their communities from their home pages, but in less prominent locations. While not ideal, that’s still good. But many companies, even ones with vibrant communities, don’t put them on their home pages at all. Often this is despite the best efforts of the community team. The community manager in one such company has been trying to get a home page link for over a year.

How do you make the home page thing happen? Here are some things to try:

1. Begging and pleading.
2. Looking for examples of competitors that feature their communities on their home pages. Nothing spurs action like showing what the competition is doing.
3. Asking to include a home page link for a trial period of, say, one month. Measure the impact this placement has on the community metrics you track. Can you show a compelling correlation between a home page link and an increase in page views, membership, and return visits? Can you translate these numbers to positive business results?
4. What else works? Perhaps those of you who have fought this battle can share your experience and insights below…

While I haven’t formally tracked home page links to communities, it does appear that this practice is increasing. And that’s a good sign. When it comes to showing your customers how you value them, there’s no place like home.

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